{#
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{% extends "foundation/annualreport/2021/article/base.html" %}

{% block page_title %}Community is key to our next chapter | The State of Mozilla{% endblock %}

{% block letter_title %}Community is key to our next chapter{% endblock %}

{% block letter_content %}
  <p class="byline">Mark Surman, President and Executive Director</p>

  <p>I’ve always thought the best way to describe Mozilla’s personality is “extroverted.”</p>

  <p>
    We’re at our best when we’re engaging with a wide community — the builders, activists, researchers,
    entrepreneurs, artists, and others around the world who are doing things to push the internet in a
    better direction.
  </p>

  <p>
    Mozilla is also at our best when we’re <em>supporting</em> that community. We don’t want to just engage —
    we want to fuel it, grow it, and help transform it into a powerful global movement. Since our
    founding, Mozilla’s mission has been to “guard the open nature of the internet,” and that's
    something we've never imagined doing alone. Our plan — and our core ethos — is to lift up the
    like-minded people, projects, and organizations around us.
  </p>

  <p>
    In the early days, this community existed mostly around Firefox, Thunderbird and other open-source
    projects. With this community, we were able to radically shift the direction of the web — and then
    internet — toward open standards, competition and choice.
  </p>

  <p>
    In more recent years, our community has expanded to include a broad collection of people uncovering
    online harms and blazing a path for a better digital future, many of which we support with grants or
    fellowships. For example, our Tech and Society Fellows shine a light on <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/blog/meet-odanga-madung-holding-tech-platforms-accountable-in-kenya/?{{ utm_params }}">online disinformation in Kenya</a>
    and <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/blog/meet-tarcizio-silva-exposing-algorithmic-racism/?{{ utm_params }}">algorithmic bias in Brazil</a>.
    Our <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/blog/10-projects-rethinking-data-stewardship-announcing-mozillas-latest-creative-media-awards?{{ utm_params }}/">Creative Media Awardees</a>
    create films, games, and browser extensions that show the general public how AI systems and data
    collection affect their lives. And our <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/what-we-fund/awards/responsible-computer-science-challenge/?{{ utm_params }}">Responsible Computer Science Challenge</a>
    funds professors across the U.S. who are integrating ethics into their computer science curricula.
    When we think of the Mozilla community today, it doesn’t just include open-source developers — it
    also includes thousands of researchers, artists, and educators like these.
  </p>

  <p>
    And, it includes almost 4 million people around the world who have decided to join Mozilla’s online
    campaign efforts to make the internet better. Over the past year, many of these people donated
    their data to <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/blog/mozilla-investigation-youtubes-dislike-button-other-user-controls-largely-fail-to-stop-unwanted-recommendations/?{{ utm_params }}">help us study whether YouTube’s user controls protect people</a>
    from harmful content (spoiler: mostly they don’t). Others donated their time and their voice to
    <a href="https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/languages?{{ utm_params }}">help build the world’s most inclusive dataset</a>
    for training voice AI (think Siri, but in Kinyarwanda and Catalan). And still others <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/campaigns/sign-letter-AICOA/?{{ utm_params }}">co-signed Mozilla’s letter to the U.S. Congress</a>
    encouraging urgent action on legislation to break up monopolies and promote competition in the tech
    industry. These people are making a huge impact by showing politicians and companies that people
    want a better internet — and by actually helping us to build one.
  </p>

  <p>
    Together, these grantmaking and campaign efforts make up Mozilla’s movement building programs. We
    dedicate approximately 2% of Firefox revenue (almost $100M over the past five years) to funding
    these movement building programs, which are in many cases matched by funds from other foundations
    or the public.
  </p>

  <p>
    Over the coming years, we plan to expand our community efforts even further, with a strong focus on
    growing the ecosystem of founders and teams dedicated to building more responsible tech products. As
    an initial step, we launched Mozilla Ventures in early November. The idea behind Mozilla Ventures is
    this: create a first-of-its-kind impact venture fund that invests in startups pushing the internet —
    and the tech industry — in a better direction. We’ve met hundreds of founders who are building
    companies like this. All of them have shared that one of their biggest challenges is finding investors
    who align with their values, and who can support them on the journey of building products that not only
    delight people, but also respect them. We plan to address that challenge, and hope other investors will
    join us and follow suit.
  </p>

  <p>
    Mozilla has always been about community. We’ve known — and we know — that even if we create 10 incredibly
    successful new products and run 100 world changing campaigns, that will not be enough on its own to send
    the internet in a better direction. We hope that we will be only one amongst thousands of companies
    successfully building products and imagining a different future alongside us. Helping to grow this
    community — this movement, this ecosystem — continues to be at the heart of who Mozilla is and what we do
    as we move into our next chapter.
  </p>
{% endblock %}
